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Link Juice flow control

I'm really interested in a good explanation of how to control the flow of link juice. Most of my inbound links currently go to my home page, and I was just wondering how to maximise the link juice flow to those pages that I want ranking.

Is there any benefit to nofollowing pages in my navigation that I don't need to rank?

As above, but with links in my footer, such as privacy policy and the like (can i not waste link juice on these pages?)

Does more link juice flow to pages higher up in my code?

These are just some of the questions I'm concerned with. Basically, I'd really like to know the best-practices for sending link juice to where it is needed most.

3 Responses

It used to be possible to use nofollow to redirect more juice to where you wanted it. But Google changed the algo so now that's not the case. See Rand's excellent pieces on it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-maybe-changes-how-the-pagerank-algorithm-handles-nofollow and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow

No, nav and footer links do not suck juice that you could otherwise redirect somewhere else via 'nofollow'.

Yes, juice is split evenly between all outgoing links on a page. So if you reduce the number of links (by deleting them, not just making them 'nofollow') then you can increase the juice passed to the remaining links on the page. This is why it's rarely a good idea to have a page with tons of links on it; each one is going to only pass a little bit of juice.

Having said that, nav and footer links can be very helpful for the humans who visit your site, so you don't want to strip them all away and make your site hard to use. But If you have dozens of barely-useful links jammed into your footer then you should probably nuke those.

Design your site for humans. And trust that Google will do something reasonable with the link juice flowing around your site.

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